What Is An Integration Platform

Convictional is an integration platform. What is an integration platform? Businesses that buy and sell things need a way to share transaction information. There are various ways to do this now and none of them work very well unless you have a deep understanding of IT or you like typing.

For those who are not at a point where in-housing your IT makes sense and who want something a little more automated than having to rekey every order and invoice your business touches, there did not used to be many other options. We are proposing a new one.

An integration platform is an automated way to send, receive, and translate transaction information with your trading partners. It might include sharing information between your own systems, but the key role is a more standard way to make sure you and your partners don’t have to type anything in order to be able to share information through your supply chain. Today this is handled by EDI and that is where having your own IT people is needed to maintain the integration.

Most small businesses today are using online tools to manage accounting and sell things. Whether that is ecommerce or just sending invoices mainly depends on who you are selling to, the key thing that your transaction information lives online but it’s not being easily shared.

We think there is a lot of value to sharing transaction information so we want to enable it for as many companies as we can. And while we think there is a place for EDI in the future, there is no reason to use it when both companies involved are using online systems that don't use EDI to manage your business.

Why take something in a modern data format, turn it into EDI only to turn it back into a modern data format at the other end? That does not make much sense to us. Translation and validation are expensive to setup and maintain for most small companies, even though more easily scaling arguably benefits them the most.

We started by making it easy for two companies on Shopify to trade with each other. This alone opens up lots of opportunities for drop shipping, wholesale, affiliate marketing and more to happen without anything needing to touch EDI or rekey orders. You can have scalable B2B without IT expense, marketplace fees or manual typing.

In the coming months you will hear more from us about how you can use an integration platform to make your life easier, more easily scale how you trade with partners and ultimately grow faster. We'll be adding new automations, trading partners and platforms.

We hope you will share your ideas with us too. Because that is why we are here: to help you share information with your partners without lifting a finger or writing a line of code. And in order to succeed we will have to do a lot of learning about how small companies actually run online.